Deep Archives January-June 2006

Kiddie Kulture.

Have you seen this item in the New York Times?
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PUBLISHER RECALLS FOURTH-GRADER'S NOVEL AMID PLAGIARISM CHARGES

NEW
YORK - Amid an escalating crisis over charges of literary theft, the
publisher of a bestselling novel authored by a fourth-grader has
announced it is recalling all copies of the book from store shelves and
asking retailers to halt sales.

Simon
and Schuster, publisher of the blockbuster novel "How Tissa Grabbed
Katie's Lunch, Grabbed Her Hair and Grabbed a Life," yesterday reversed
its previous defense of the book and said that it will withdraw and
destroy all copies immediately. The publisher offered no reason for its
abrupt change of position.

The
"Tissa" novel, written by nine-year-old Connecticut grade-school
student Mandy Tillerman, had an initial press run of 120,000 copies and
reached Number 27 on the online extended New York Times Hardcover
Fiction Bestseller List. Several Hollywood studios were said to have
been interested in making it into a film, but this appears to have been
scuttled by the plagiarism uproar.

The
novel, Ms. Tillerman's first, was released earlier this year to
nationwide fanfare, and she was hailed as a major new voice in the
so-called "literary vernacular," a lucrative new genre of novels by
non-writers, until the plagiarism scandal hit. According to the
Associated Press, charges of plagiarism were first leveled in the PTA
newsletter at Ms. Tillerman's school by the parent of a classmate, an
avid reader of "vernacular" novelist CeeCee Starling, from whose work
Ms. Tillerman allegedly lifted dozens of passages.

Nine-year-old
Ms. Tillerman has acknowledged being "like, an amazing fan" of novelist
Ms. Starling, a 10-year-old fifth-grader who has authored three
bestselling books to date. But Ms. Tillerman insisted last week in a
published apology that any borrowing of language was "not on purpose,
okay? No way."

Ms.
Starling's hit novels include "You, Too, Booger-Face," "Bite My Thong,"
and her latest, "How Liza Lost Her Lunch," from which Ms. Tillerman is
alleged to have plagiarized. All three novels have ranked Number 30 or
higher on the New York Times Hardcover Fiction Bestseller List.

Stanley
Gilding, vice president of Simon and Schuster, said in a statement
yesterday, "We admit no deliberate plagiarism. But we regret this
incident and its effect on Ms. Tillerman's and Ms. Starling's work, and
we wish to put it behind us so that both writers can continue to
productively pursue their craft." He said that a revised version of the
"Tissa" novel, with all questionable text removed, will be released
later this year.

Ms. Starling's publisher, Ballantine, replied in its own statement yesterday, "We have reached a satisfactory agreement
whereby the integrity and reputation of our author will be protected."

The
alleged plagiarism victim, young Ms. Starling, when asked by reporters
if she was angry at Ms. Tillerman, said, "I'm sure she didn't, like,
mean it. I'm not going to go claw her face off or anything. It's not
worth it."

Since
the story broke, talk shows and blog sites have engaged in ceaseless
and sometimes obsessively detailed scrutiny of the often striking
similarities between Ms. Tillerman's and Ms. Starling's language in
their novels.

Here are a few examples comparing excerpts from Ms. Tillerman's "How Tissa Grabbed Katie's Lunch, Grabbed Her Hair
and Grabbed a Life" with Ms. Starling's "How Liza Lost Her Lunch":

"Stoomie
is, like, such drool. He just stares at you across the lunchroom and
you want to, like, wash off the spit. Some girls think he's cute but
that's because they've never had to stand behind him in lunch line and
smell the dookie in his dirty pants." - Mandy Tillerman, "Tissa," page 24

"Stookie
is, like, a string of drool with eyes. He looks at you across the
lunchroom and you want to wipe off the spit. Some girls think he's cute
but that's because they've never had to stand next to him and smell the
dookie in his dirty jeans." - CeeCee Starling, "Liza," page 32

"Tissa
ran off the bus and tried not to cry. What a jerk that Katie was. What
a stupid, barf-breath, booger-eating jerk. Tissa hated her. She hated
that little bitch so much. Just wait, she said to herself. Just wait
until lunch tomorrow." - Mandy Tillerman, "Tissa," page 67

"Liza
ran off the school bus and tried to not cry. What a jerk that Stacie
was. What a stupid-assed, barf-breath, booger-eating jerk. Liza hated
her. She hated that little bitch's guts so much. Just you wait, she
said to herself. Just you wait until lunch tomorrow." - CeeCee Starling, "Liza," page 58

"Oh, God, it hurt so bad. So bad. She stuck her face deep, deep into her tear-soaked pillow and hoped that she would
drown."
- Mandy Tillerman, "Tissa," page 95

"Oh, God. It hurt so bad. So bad. She stuffed her face deep into her tear-soaked pillow and prayed that she would
drown."
- CeeCee Starling, "Liza," page 101

_________________________________

If you haven't seen this article in the Times, it's because it hasn't appeared there.

Yet.

You
can, however, read in the April 28, 2006 Times about the controversy
over a 19-year-old Harvard sophomore's bestselling novel (entitled "How
Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life") being recalled after
she allegedly plagiarized more than 40 passages from another
bestselling novel (entitled "Sloppy Firsts").

Enjoy!

(Posted 4-28-06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)

On A Roll.

You've got to love it.

The White House Easter Egg Roll went off without a hitch.

Maybe
you've heard: hundreds of gay parents, in a tactically brilliant move,
lined up en masse days early to snag free first-come first-served
tickets to Monday's annual Roll, traditionally an innocuous kiddie
photo-op for grinning presidents and first ladies that is, at most,
cute. But with this year's ingenious gesture by gay parents, the stakes
instantly skyrocketed. A president who has allied himself with
hard-right anti-gay forces found himself poised to be cast as the
Easter Bigot. There he'd be in front of the cameras, barring the White
House gates the way that segregationist Governor George Wallace blocked
the doors of the University of Alabama 43 years ago, telling crying
kids that they can't roll Easter eggs on the White House lawn because
their parents are going to hell.

It
was triangulation worthy of Bill Clinton at his savviest. And for poor
feckless W, with his you-know-whats caught in a vise of his own
cranking, there was only one honorable way out: Laura. Enter the First
Lady, who announced sweetly to the press corps that the Roll would
welcome all families. She was as good as her word on the appointed day,
as were the gay parents who had pledged to not stage political theater
and who identified themselves only with colorful rainbow leis. Eggs and
cameras rolled, kids laughed, Americans saw yet more proof that gay
families are simply families, and Team Bush sweated and waited for it
to be over. Score one for the good side.

It
is crazy, of course, for any of this to even be an issue. Imagine
poker-faced reporters droning into cameras about the "controversy"
surrounding, say, blacks being visibly present at the Easter Egg Roll.
It is a testimony to the nation's broad acceptance of rank bigotry that
we even treat such matters as subjects of debate.

Some
folks in the Taliban wing of the Christian Right are still frothing
over the perceived insult to Jesus and the Easter Bunny. There are histrionics about morals and
tradition and role models for children. But to me the most striking,
and revealing, statement in the entire brouhaha was a demure assertion
made by one Mark D. Tooley of an outfit called the Institute on
Religion and Democracy, who told the Associated Press, "I think it's
inappropriate [for gays] to use a children's event to make a political
statement."

Hmm. "Use" an event to "make a political statement"? Well, let's take a closer look at who is actually
doing the using, politically speaking.

On
the one hand, we have gay parents who want to be, well, parents. They
want to raise kids. Some of them want to get married. They want to buy
houses and care for each other in sickness and health and go on
vacation and take their kids to Easter egg hunts without being abused
or scrutinized or discriminated against. They want, basically, to not
be politically singled out by society because of their sexual
orientation.

And
we have, on the other hand, those who make it their
very purpose to single out gays for special treatment. They mount
frantic political campaigns to tell gays, "You can't marry." They stage
loud rallies to yell at gays, "You can't have equal rights." They
preach from pulpits to tell gays, "Your sexual identity is a sin." They
organize angry grassroots movements -- as a friend of mine in Ohio
tells me is now happening in that state -- to tell gays, "You can't
adopt children." At every turn, while gay Americans struggle to gain
the same treatment as everyone else -- that is, to not be treated as if
they are special -- the anti-gay forces continue to shriek to the
heavens, and to every reporter within earshot, that gays are in fact
special, that gays are different, that gays are a threat that must be
politically targeted and morally attacked.

So who is it, exactly, who is making gayness into a "political statement?" As far as I can tell, it is not the
gay moms and dads on the White House lawn.

As
with many blacks of my parents' generation -- a group of people whose
middle-class ambitions were cast as activism only by society's active
obstruction -- the main force "politicizing" gayness in America is the
obsessive, constant, and unwanted attention showered upon gays by the
hard right itself. Somebody needs to tell Mark D. Tooley that if he
thinks it is "inappropriate" to make political hay around issues of
children and families, he ought to go tell the Bush Administration and
Focus On the Family to knock it off.

Meanwhile, let the Easter eggs roll.

(Posted 4/18/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)

Celebration of What?

Take a look at this April 5, 2006 story from the Democrat and Chronicle, the daily newspaper in Rochester, New York:

OUTRAGE SPARKS ARRESTS OF 3
Police Say People Helped After Young Minister's Random Slaying
Sometimes a community will say enough is enough, and it looks as if last month's shooting death of Herschel Scriven
was one of those times.
Rochester
police Tuesday announced the arrest of three men in connection with the
slaying of the 23-year-old minister and church organist. Acting Police
Chief Timothy Hickey said outrage generated by the killing led to an
unusual amount of cooperation from the street, which provided
investigators with the information they needed. 'When
the dregs of our society take the lives of those with so much promise,
the tragedy is felt by every individual in this city and in the corner
of everyone's heart,' Hickey said. 'It gives me great satisfaction to
report this closure.'

The
newspaper story then relates the details of the crime. It's a
heartbreaker. Scriven, the minister, had just dropped off a 3-year-old
at home after attending a performance of the touring company of The
Lion King. He was backing his car out of the driveway when he
unintentionally blocked the path of three young men who, according to
police, were on their way to commit a planned armed robbery. One of the
men shot Scriven in the head. He died four days later.

For the record, the three "young men" we are talking about are, respectively, 19, 19, and 20 years of age. All
are black. So was Scriven.

What
the police and the local newspaper are celebrating here is the fact
that residents of a poor black community, long mistrustful of police,
put their collective foot down and began giving up information that
ultimately led to the arrests. In the article, the police chief
congratulated his officers and the citizens who fed them information.
The victim's brother described the arrests as "a prayer answered." A
community activist declared that the cooperation showed that "the
community does have a soul." Community leaders described citizens'
response as drawing "a line in the sand." A university criminologist
made scholarly remarks about stimulating collective morality.

Make
no mistake: there is a dire need in many poor black communities,
including those in Baltimore, where I live, for citizens to rise up and
get their collective hands around the self-destructive war-making of
the young people who terrorize their neighborhoods. Nobody knows this
better than the people who live in the midst of the carnage.

But let's take a closer look at exactly what Rochester police and journalists are celebrating.

Three
black kids -- and yes, 19- and 20-year-olds are still very much kids --
grow up in a bankrupt and violent neighborhood. They learn to accept
the idea that a handgun is the machinery of respect and that robbing
people at gunpoint is an accepted gig. On their way to said gig one
night, they unexpectedly meet a car backing out of a driveway into
their path. Whether out of trigger-happy fear of an ambush or
don't-fuck-with-me hyper-insecure bravado, one of the kids pulls a gun
and blows away the driver, who turns out to be a big-hearted,
community-minded young minister. The appalling amorality of the crime
is sufficient to trump the long-held contempt of many residents toward
police -- who the War On Drugs has molded into a deeply-resented
occupying army -- so that citizens are for once willing to finger the
suspects, and arrests are made.

In
other words, kids who grow up virtually devoid of healthy father
figures or self-esteem or hope of achievement respond, naturally, with
anger and violent paranoia. We as a society then wait for them to hurt
other people. When they predictably do so as young adults, we send them
to prison for most or all of the rest of their lives. And a chief of
police calls a press conference and happily reports this as "closure."

You can see that this approach raises a few questions.

What
kind of "closure" is it, exactly, that leaves intact a perfectly-oiled
assembly line of young black male aggression while intervening only at
the end of the line to punish the aggression so efficiently created?
What kind of "closure" sits with its hands folded while the souls of
young black males bleed profusely from birth, but then acts with
surgical precision to later carry out legal vengeance against the
damaged and dangerous young adults who inevitably emerge? What kind of
"closure" focuses its attention on catching and imprisoning adult
offenders when, for every three whose capture is happily reported at a
press conference, 300 more are created daily through a
perfectly-neglected storm of joblessness, family disintegration, drug
addiction, childhood trauma, and despair?

This is, in fact, no kind of "closure" at all. It is, instead, an open wound being treated with jail time.

And
there is something else going on here as well. Take another look at the
excerpt from the Rochester newspaper article, and you will notice a
telling detail: at one point, the reporter refers to poor black
citizenry as "the street" (as in, "...the killing led to an unusual
amount of cooperation from the street."). If the phrase sounds familiar
to you, it is because this is the same term used by Western observers
and journalists to describe the masses of Arabic peoples whose beliefs
and actions form the broad public opposition that so confounds America
in nations such as Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Whether in the poor black
neighborhoods of a city like Rochester or in the impoverished Sadr City
area of Baghdad, "the street" is the American mainstream's shorthand
for "downtrodden folks whose lives and ideas we don't understand." This
is both an admission of our own perplexity and a crude caricaturing of
the social fabric of communities that are feared and loathed by many
Americans. When, for example, was the last time you heard the phrase
"the street" used to describe the mood of the citizenry of Beverly
Hills, or of suburban Atlanta, or of Orange County, California? And
when did you last hear a criminologist making casually clinical
observations about the morality of such non-urban, non-black
communities?

Even
as a nationwide battle rages over illegal immigration -- another magnet
for many Americans' demonizing of others -- we have alien-ized an
entire population of native-born American citizens: the urban black
poor. For their problems, official society has defined "closure" as the
clang of an iron cell door.

And that is nothing to celebrate.

(Posted 4/6/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)

A Sorry Showing.

With our
official chroniclers being so generous these days in dispensing the
mantle of "hero" (the title is now bestowed upon the tragic legacy of
virtually every uniformed American man or woman who dies following
senseless orders), the story of Rachel Corrie serves, like an ice-water
dunking, to shock us back into understanding the meaning of the word.

You
might remember her: the 23-year-old activist from Olympia, Washington
who was crushed to death in 2003 by an Israeli military bulldozer as
she stood with outstretched arms, wearing an orange vest, attempting to
block the demolition of the home of a Palestinian family amid Israel's
campaign to clear-cut Palestinian border neighborhoods in the name of
security.

As
it turns out, Corrie was a writer of some ability as well as an
activist, and her copious and revealing journals were edited into a
play, a one-woman show titled "My Name is Rachel Corrie," which took
London by storm last year. The play was the biggest sellout in 50 years
at London's Royal Court Theatre, and has since moved to the West End,
London's equivalent of Broadway, where it is expected to be a smash.

This
year, New Yorkers were also expecting to be able to see the play until,
weeks before its scheduled March 22 opening at the New York Theatre
Workshop (NYTW), the theater suddenly announced an open-ended
postponement of the play's debut amid intense pressure from groups not
pleased with the dramatic message of a blue-eyed blond American
pro-Palestinian activist. It seems that in an age of quisling liberals
diving for cover from post-9/11 political vigilantism, these tickets
were, in the words of a cover story in The Nation, "too hot for New
York."

The
outrage from theatrical luminaries was deservedly swift and widespread.
The play's co-creator, Alan Rickman, proclaimed in the Guardian of
London, "This is censorship born out of fear." Nobel literary laureate
Harold Pinter, in a letter to the New York Times signed by nearly 20
other well-known self-described Jewish playwrights and writers, said
that NYTW's claims of recent Mideast developments making the Corrie
play too controversial "make no sense," and asked, "what is it about
Rachel Corrie's writings... that New York audiences must be protected
from?" Actress Vanessa Redgrave declared to Pacifica Radio that NYTW's
failure of will is "an act of catastrophic cowardice." Famed playwright
Tony Kushner, whose own work has been featured at NYTW, wrote in a
letter to the New York Observer that he is "disappointed and
disheartened by this decision and... baffled by the subsequent attempts
to justify it."

The
record, sadly, illustrates NYTW's willing surgical removal of its own
spine in this matter. In response to early opposition to the play from
some quarters, the theater's leadership, by its own admission in a
March 22 interview on Pacifica's Democracy Now!, began a community
"dialogue" process that involved pro-Israel partisans but no
Arab-Americans. It began backing away from previously-agreed
commitments to stage the play. It started to suggest, after the fact,
to the play's British creators the need for audience "discussions"
including pro-Israel scholars after each performance to place the play
in "context." Most damningly, NYTW revealed its own lack of stomach for
defense of artistic and political principle in the face of politically
and financially influential opposition.

It
is to their credit that, after the compost hit the fan, NYTW Artistic
Director James Nicola and Managing Director Lynn Moffat agreed to do
the Pacifica interview at all; the broadcast was a debate between them
on the one side and the play's co-editor, Katherine Viner, whose sense
of offense at NYTW's moral cave-in reflects the feelings of the play's
other British creators and backers as well as of Corrie's parents
themselves [full transcript of the debate is at
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/03/22/1435259]. Democracy
Now! host Amy Goodman is not known for lobbing softballs, and Nicola
and Moffat, clearly no more morally steady on their feet than when they
first took on the Corrie play, were out of their league. One might feel
sorry for them but for the fact that the political cost of their
cowardice is, for the broader artistic community, much greater than its
personal cost for the two of them. Throughout the interview Nicola and
Moffat betrayed, to their lasting shame, a feckless aversion to
fighting back against the currently intimidating forces of cultural
censorship.

I
suggest that you go and hear (or read) Nicola's and Moffat's remarks
for yourself. It wasn't pretty: Nicola stumbled, whimpered and
equivocated through tortured attempts at self-justification by
reiterating how very, very hard it is to try to mount a play when
people get mad. And Moffat, for her part, stuck to a steely script of
utter nonsense about the play's unique incorrigibility and the awful
practical problems it posed. The British co-writer Viner, admirably
restraining her likely desire to knock Nicola's and Moffat's squishy
heads together, dispatched their hopeless arguments with civil
precision. She also left them flat-footed by refusing, on the air,
their plaintive offer to try to find some way for NYTW to stage the
play; NYTW no longer merits any trust, she replied, and the play's
creators have been inundated with offers from other American theaters
to put on the play, one of which they hope to accept.

The
heart of the matter, I think, is that theater people like Nicola and
Moffat have been accepting toasts at cocktail parties and bowing for
applauding trustees at board meetings for so long that they have
forgotten how to take a flurry of punishing shots to the chops (or to
the gut) for the sake of their mission. In the Pacifica interview, both
Nicola and Moffat recited, like a mantra, that it was their Herculean
task with the Corrie play to, in Nicola's words, make it "safe" for
Corrie's message to be heard without its being "polluted" by the raging
political argument surrounding the Israeli occupation. It is as if
Nicola and Moffat hoped to shuffle mute audiences in and out of this
political fireball of a play -- in Manhattan, no less -- with no muss,
no fuss, and no need to take a fighting stance in the face of irate
theater funders and infuriated political zealots. The essential and
unavoidable need to stand up and fight in public for a work such as the
Corrie play seems to have entirely taken these two by surprise. Even on
the radio, one could sense their blinking disorientation. I think they
are still in shock at having had such demands made of them.

Nicola's
blubbering, in fact, reached its absurd peak in the interview when he
cited, as if pointing to a newly-uncovered neutron bomb, a friend's
having told him of an online claim that Rachel Corrie was a registered
member of Hamas. People are out to slander Corrie and my play! he
gasped. Well, duh. A lot of people hate the cause that Corrie
supported, and some of them lie on the Internet, and a few are flat-out
wacko, and others will go all-out with their financial and political
clout against a theater that takes a stand for a
Palestinian-sympathetic production. Hello? Earth to Jim. This is part
of the job description for a theater artistic director who has
principles. It is high time more artists posed dramatic challenges to
the orthodoxy of American support for the amoral militarism and
self-excusing atrocities of the current Israeli regime.

Welcome to the new McCarthyism: an era of contagious and officially-mongered fear that, like the 1950s, separates the
heroes from the, er, James Nicolas.

(Posted 3/27/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)

Franz on the Front Page.

For a sense of how Kafka might have authored a single day's edition of a newspaper, take a look at the March 20, 2006 New
York Times.

Two of the lead stories evoke as poetically horrific an image of the moral free-fall of a nation's political leadership
as you are ever likely to see.

The first story:

New
studies from Columbia, Princeton and Harvard show, with hard numbers,
that young poor black American males, as a group, are hardening at
terrifying speed into a caste with little or no connection to
mainstream American life. Or, if you prefer the metaphor, they are
becoming a separate country, like a black male Third-World territory
whose presence within American borders is strictly a matter of
geography. Its separateness is, of course, an entirely American
creation. But the starkness of this separateness has now hit the front
pages.

We
have had years of warning about this in cities like mine, Baltimore,
where studies going back more than 10 years, as far as I can remember,
have shown (and still do) that more than half of the city's young black
males have either been in jail or under the supervision of the criminal
justice system. Walk or drive through parts of the city, and you don't
need a study to tell you what is happening.

But the national breadth and gravity of the studies in the Times story have now made this issue of the leper-ized black
male an Official Mainstream Shock. As it should be. To quote the Times:

"...the
new studies... show that the huge pool of poorly educated black men are
becoming ever more disconnected from the mainstream society, and to a
far greater degree than comparable white or Hispanic men. Especially in
the country's inner cities, the studies show, finishing high school is
the exception, legal work is scarcer than ever and prison is almost
routine, with incarceration rates climbing for blacks even as urban
crime rates have declined. Although the problems afflicting poor black
men have been known for decades, the new data paint a more extensive
and sobering picture of the challenges they face. "'There's
something very different happening with young black men, and it's
something we can no longer ignore,' said Ronald B. Mincy, professor of
social work at Columbia University and editor of 'Black Males Left
Behind' (Urban Institute Press, 2006). "'Over the last two decades, the economy did great,' Mr. Mincy said, 'and low-skilled women, helped by public policy,
latched onto it. But young black men were falling farther back.'"

I
can't quite get with Mincy's sunny assessment of the past 20 years of
"the economy" -- a term that disguises hugely disproportionate benefits
for the wealthy -- and its alleged boon for poor black women. But a few
statistics from the new studies cited in the Times dramatize the kind
of catastrophe we are talking about with young black men:

- In inner cities, more than 50 percent of black men drop out of high school.

-
By 2004, 72 percent of black male high school dropouts in their 20s
were unemployed (unable to find work, not looking, or in jail),
compared with 34 percent of white dropouts and 19 percent of Hispanic
dropouts. Add in black high school graduates and the unemployment rate
was still 50 percent.

- By 2004, 21 percent of black men in their 20s who didn't go to college were incarcerated. By their mid-30s, 60 percent
of black high school dropouts had spent time in prison.

It
does bear mentioning (although it is not in the Times story) that is
there is one glinting link that does perennially connect the mainstream
with the culture of poor young black males: their music, currently
hip-hop, which, like black musics before it, is now the mainstay of
American (and global) pop culture, and which provides the soundtrack
for the social lives of white suburban teen-agers who would, on any
city street, run screaming from any actual in-the-flesh poor inner-city
black male.

But that's another story.

What
the studies show, in any color, in any language, is that there is an
ongoing disaster in the lives of young black males. People who are in a
position to know have been telling us for years what causes this:
poverty, lack of access to a job market that is fleeing to the suburbs,
self-hatred due to failure to live up to a patriarchal society's ideals
for males, the appeal of drugs as an escape and as a high-paying
employer, shredded families, boys with few healthy men to emulate. We
also know a lot about what it would take to solve these catastrophic
problems: a huge public investment in urban jobs projects (in effect, a
modern WPA or CCC), a massive job training effort, funding for ample
drug treatment and prevention, AIDS programs, comprehensive and
affordable health care, day care, family therapy, mentoring,
well-resourced schools with well-paid teachers, effective and
well-funded programs to re-socialize ex-convicts to a free and legal
life.

The total national cost to do this in every major American city? Anywhere from tens to hundreds of billions of dollars.

Which brings us to the second story in the March 20th edition of the Times:

In
a two-minute statement to reporters outside the White House, a
surreally optimistic President George W. Bush, in utter denial of the
shambles of his Iraq policy, talked cheerfully about how well the war
is going and then went back inside with his wife. Again, to quote the
Times:

"On
the third anniversary of a war that they once expected to be over by
now, President Bush and senior officials argued Sunday that their
strategy was working despite escalating violence in Iraq, even as a
former Iraqi prime minister once favored by the White House declared
that a civil war had already started."

The
Times story goes on in awful detail: Bush speaking breezily of his
being "encouraged by the progress" of the war and evading reporters'
questions about how this could be so; Dick "Five Draft Deferments"
Cheney counseling grit and patience for the war effort; Donald Rumsfeld
prattling gamely (and insultingly) about the American mission in Iraq
being the equivalent of the Allied fight against Hitler.

Meanwhile,
Iraq's once Bush-friendly former interim prime minister, Ayad Allawi,
told the BBC, according to the Times, that Iraq was approaching a
"'point of no return... It is unfortunate that we are in civil war. We
are losing each day, as an average, 50 to 60 people through the
country, if not more... If this is not civil war, then God knows what
civil war is.'"

So far, this explosively failed enterprise has killed 32,000 to 37,000 Iraqis and more than 2,300 Americans. There is
no end in sight.

The cost to date? $250 billion. A figure to keep in mind when considering our country's unattended domestic catastrophes.

If your hands shake and your jaw tightens as you write out your tax check to the IRS on April 15, I will understand.

All of which brings us back to Kafka, that merciless seer of the worst in human potential. For one day at least, the New
York Times seems to have caught his knack for nightmarish irony.

Perhaps soon we will be greeted by a page-one story about President Bush having awakened one morning in his bed, inexplicably,
as a giant insect.

It might bring an improvement, actually, in his skills in cooperating as a member of the teeming global community.

(Posted 3/21/2006 by Bruce A. Jacobs)

Hunt Innocent. Bush Guilty.

I hope you'll bear with me if my posts are a bit more brief in the next couple of weeks. I am finishing a book and working
under (self-inflicted) killer pressure. But relief is near.

In the meantime, I was struck today by two harshly contrasting sides of humanity.

One side is that of Darryl Hunt. His story is best told by this blurb from his website [http://www.darrylhuntproject.org/],
from which he runs a project dedicated to freeing prisoners wrongly convicted of crimes:

"In
1985, Darryl Hunt, an 18 year old African American, was convicted for
the rape and vicious murder of a young, white female newspaper
reporter. In two trials, despite the fact that there was no evidence
linking him to the crime, 23 white jurors found Hunt guilty based on
eyewitness testimony. The case graphically revealed the difficulties
between cross-racial identification. The testimonies taken into
consideration were those of a 14 year old, Caucasian heroin addict; a
former Klansman; and a man who, before finally fingering Hunt as the
perpetrator, had wrongly identified two other men. "Before
his second trial in 1990, Darryl Hunt rejected a plea bargain that
would have immediately made him a free man. In 1994 DNA tests performed
on semen samples did not match that of Darryl Hunt. But, he was denied
a third trial. The North Carolina Supreme Court upheld the denial 4-3
and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear the case. "In
response to a petition by Darryl Hunt's attorney a Superior Court judge
finally ordered that the DNA specimens found at the crime scene be
matched against a database containing information on violent criminals
in North Carolina. This resulted in a match to another individual
proving Darryl Hunt's innocence. "In February of 2004 all charges against Darryl Hunt were dismissed. He subsequently received a full pardon from
the Governor."

I
heard Hunt on the radio on March 2 on the Marc Steiner Show, a gem of a
program on NPR station WYPR in Baltimore. Hunt's case, long since
documented, was a nightmare of misidentification, racist presumption,
and conspiratorial concealment of his innocence by police and
prosecutors to avoid bureaucratic humiliation. It is a horror story of
the first degree, and yet another devastating argument for abolition of
the death penalty, a perfectly irrevocable punishment invoked by an
inherently flawed system. If you read about Hunt's case in detail, it
will likely bring you to tears.

What
moved me most about Hunt's radio interview was his ironclad and regal
compassion. When asked if any of the many police officers, attorneys,
judges and witnesses who railroaded him have since apologized or
admitted moral culpability, he replied that no, none of them have. But
he then went on to say that he expects no apologies; the people truly
owed an apology, he said, are the family members of the murder victim,
who were lied to by the state for 20 years -- and who still, in their
blind rage, blame Hunt for the crime despite DNA proof of his innocence
and the subsequent confession of the true perpetrator.

This from a man who was wrongly imprisoned for 20 years.

If you are prepared to be both infuriated and inspired, get the entire story at his website.

On
the flip side of humanity, however, is the latest bulletin concerning
our mendacious president, who an AP-acquired video has now revealed to
have lied yet again, this time in his claim four days after Katrina
that neither he nor other top officials anticipated the breach of the
levees. In fact, as the video proves, Bush and others were fully
briefed on the likelihood that the levees would break and that federal
response would be insufficient.

In
the August 28, 2005 video, Bush sits with his elbows on the table while
being warned of impending disaster, asks no questions, and then replies
with empty homilies about how the feds will stay on top of things. The
video is remarkable, among other things, for revealing the near-frantic
concern of then- FEMA chief Michael D. Brown, who is now beginning to
look more and more like a fall guy for an administration that simply
didn't care.

For
the full story in the March 1 issue of Editor & Publisher, go to
[http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002114558].

(Posted 3/2/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)

Hari-Larry.

If ever
there were a case of university presidential suicide, it has to be that
of the now ex-chief of my alma mater, Lawrence H. Summers, who resigned
from Harvard February 21 before being fired or facing a second vote of
no confidence from the university's undergraduate Faculty of Arts and
Sciences.

Summers's
five-year tenure was the shortest of any Harvard president since the
Civil War, according to the university daily Harvard Crimson. It is
certainly the stormiest in my memory. And although I claim no special
knowledge as an alum -- I haven't had any substantive contact
with Harvard in at least 20 years -- it is pretty clear to me that
Summers designed, built and hoisted himself with his own petard. He is
an object lesson in how not to approach an elite, opinionated and
socially-conscious faculty.

We
can begin with Summers's ill-advised decision early in his presidency
to get in the face of well-known African American scholar and speaker
Cornel West, telling West in a private meeting that West was inflating
grades and that he had better stop writing about culture and stop
making rap CDs and start being a serious scholar, according to the
Washington Post [2/22/06]. I know nothing about the alleged grade
inflation. But I'm a little bit familiar with West's work, and it is
not clear to me how his many published works and his writing about
culture are not "serious," nor how his having made a rap CD is at all
relevant.

Let's
just say that West was, uh, pissed as a result. He told Summers where
to go, told the press that Summers was "messing with the wrong black
man" (again according to the Post), and left for Princeton. It was a
disaster and an embarrassment for Harvard. At that point the score
became Miscalculation 1, Summers 0.

Then,
in 2005, Summers moved on to the issue of women's innate abilities.
Having apparently left his brain on the front seat of his car, he
walked into a conference and gave a talk in which he said that the
shortage of women in math and science may be due to their "intrinsic
aptitude." A near-riot ensued. Summers went into an apology-loop in the
following weeks. But the damage was done. Miscalculation 2, Summers 0.
He never recovered.

Add
to that Summers's reportedly abrasive and authoritarian management
style, and you have a recipe for a vote of no confidence from the
undergraduate faculty of America's most prestigious university. Which
is exactly what he got in 2005. He was headed for no confidence vote
number two when, reading the tea leaves from the Harvard Corporation,
which signs his paycheck, he announced his resignation, effective at
the end of this semester. He says he will return to Harvard as an
economics professor after a year off. His acting replacement will be
75-year-old Derek Bok, who happens to have been Harvard President while
I was there in the 1970s.

What
is interesting to me is that Summers remains highly popular with
students, who in an online Harvard Crimson poll backed him three to
one. There is obviously a gulf between what students and undergraduate
faculty want, and if I were to hazard a guess (based on nothing but a
hunch), I would say it might have to do with students seeing him more
as a decisive corporate CEO while faculty members view him as a
politically-challenged peer who does not play well with others.

Me, I sent my alumni letter to the Harvard Board suggesting that they fire Summers last year.

What
is the moral of the story for a university president? I don't know.
Maybe, "Be critical but don't be stupid." Or, as an advertising
creative director told me years ago after I badly screwed up, "You want
to try to not set fire to your clothes."

(Posted 2/28/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)

Cartoon Democracy.

For
thoughtful commentary on the flames now licking at the Western world in
the wake of a series of Danish cartoons, one of which featured the
prophet Muhammad with a turban shaped like a bomb, I suggest Gary
Younge's "The Right To Be Offended"
[http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060227/younge] in the February 27 issue
of The Nation.

Younge
raises two points that need to be heard above the self-righteous
responses of the West. First, he explains, the "clash of civilizations"
mainstream claptrap put forth as a Western explanation for Muslims'
anger -- that is, the idea that Islam cannot coexist with free speech
-- is false:

"Even
on its own terms this logic is disingenuous. The right to offend must
come with at least one consequent right and one subsequent
responsibility. People must have the right to be offended, and those
bold enough to knowingly cause offense should be bold enough to weather
the consequences, so long as the aggrieved respond within the law.
Muslims were in effect being vilified twice--once through the original
cartoons and then again for having the gall to protest them."

And secondly, Younge, points out, all of the Western head-shaking and indignation at the ensuing Muslim violence entirely
misses the point as to why the cartoons matter in the first place:

"Neither
the cartoons nor the violence has emerged from a vacuum. They are
steeped in and have contributed to an increasingly recriminatory
atmosphere shaped by, among other things, war, intolerance and historic
injustices. According to the Danish Institute for Human Rights,
racially motivated crimes doubled in Denmark between 2004 and '05.
These cartoons only served to compound Muslims' sense of alienation and
vulnerability. The Jerusalem Post has now published the cartoons.
Iranian newspaper Hamshari is calling for illustrators to ridicule the
Holocaust. The race to the gutter is on."

Younge
is right on both counts. If you live in a society that values free
speech, you don't get to slather public space with rank ethnic or
religious slurs -- as with that certifiable crank Ann Coulter -- and
escape lawful condemnation. Nor do you get to duck the acknowledgment
that the ensuing rage -- or even violence -- stems more from historic
injustice than from some sudden inability of the complainants to take a
joke. This is not a rationalization of violence. It is, actually, a way
of addressing it.

Some
of us here in the North American wing of Denmark have been saying this
about talk-show slurs and sensitive political hair-triggers for years.
It's not that fruitcakes and racists and homophobes and misogynists do
not have the constitutional right to say horrible things. They do. But
they also have the constitutional obligation (precisely for reasons of
free speech) to suck it up when they get pounded with enraged reactions
that are within the law. Moreover, they have the moral obligation to
face up to the institutional injustices that make a cartoon or an
ethnic joke so explosive.

The
Los Angeles Rodney King riots and the O.J. Simpson trial were entirely
about this very phenomenon. If L.A. were an environment where blacks
had a history of fair treatment by police, a guilty verdict for O.J.
might have taken a jury an hour and caused a furor only among
paparazzi, and King's videotaped beating by cops (and the verdict that
followed) would have caused outrage but likely not insurrection. But
L.A.'s history, instead, has been one of abuse, corruption and contempt
when it comes to the treatment of African American citizens by the
police. The resulting rage has been palpable. And so, after the King
videotape and the Simi Valley verdict exonerating the officers, L.A.
was "suddenly" in flames. And O.J. was "not guilty." And countless
white Americans were shocked, shocked at the bizarre behavior of those
black folks.

To
paraphrase every high school commencement speaker in America, with
fundamental rights come great responsibilities. With the right to speak
abusively comes the responsibility to understand that your abusive
speech may inflame long-standing injustices. Or, as Younge puts it, "If
our commitment to free speech is important, our belief in antiracism
should be no less so."

So,
along with freedom of speech, how about freedom of predominantly-Muslim
countries from American economic and political hegemony? How about
freedom of Iraq from American oil-motivated occupation? How about the
freedom of Palestinians to seek statehood and hold elections without
American support of the current hypocritical and jack-booted Israeli
regime?

Now, that would be democracy in action.

(Posted 2/22/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)

Dirty Politics Redefined.

Well, I can't say this is one of my prouder days as a Marylander.

Maybe some of you non-Marylanders have seen the surreal CNN footage on the story I am about to relate.

Our
state's current comptroller (and former governor and Baltimore mayor)
is an 84-year-old piece of work named William Donald Schaefer known for
outlandish and insulting behavior. I would tell you his whole story --
how he was a cult hero as Baltimore mayor, cruising the streets in his
limo and calling in on his mobile phone to lop off heads when he found
a large pothole or a pile of uncollected trash; how he had half the
bus-stop benches in town painted with his name; how he has insulted
everyone from people of color to women; how he had a longtime (out of
wedlock) partner named Hilda Mae Snoops (seriously, that was her name)
who moved into the Governor's Mansion with him but is now deceased --
I'd tell you his entire unbelievable story, but there isn't time or
space. So let's just say that Willie Don, as folks here in Charm City
like to call the man who has settled into his later years as
comptroller, is a strange critter known for strange behavior.

But this week he outdid himself. As I said, maybe you caught the footage as it ran again and again on CNN. Here is an
account from the Baltimore Sun [2/17/06]:

"During
Wednesday's Board of Public Works meeting, attended by the governor and
more than 100 state officials, workers and journalists, Schaefer
requested that a 24-year-old executive assistant to [Governor] Ehrlich
bring him tea. After placing the beverage on the table in front of him,
she turned to leave, but he called her back. He had one more request. "'Walk again,' he said, and as she obliged, the comptroller appeared to gawk at her as she left the room.
"Schaefer
unleashed a string of harsh words at journalists who asked about the
incident later. She 'ought to be damn happy that I observed her going
out the door,' Schaefer said. 'The day I don't look at pretty women is
the day I die.'"

The
Sun story went on to quote various infuriated onlookers and political
sages as to how it is that Schaefer seems able to get away with such
pre-Neanderthal conduct. The consensus seems to be that everyone
expects him to be an ass and that the Maryland electorate has
gotten accustomed to it. Amazing, but, I believe, true. No doubt his
legendary (and popular) crotchety charisma also makes him hard to
touch.

But
the other factor, I think, is Marylanders' historically low
expectations for their politicians. This is the state, after all, that
brought us not only Spiro Agnew (yes, I admit it) but also his
felonious fellow governor Marvin Mandel, who, unlike the "nolo
contendere" Nixon henchman and tax evader, actually did time for mail
fraud and racketeering.

Maryland's
compost-like political cachet is further ripened by current Governor
Robert Ehrlich, a beady-eyed Bush-Lite Republican already known for his
administration's Rove-inspired sleazoid tactics -- coercing state
employees to toe the hard-right Republican line; having an assistant
who spawned an Internet campaign of vicious and untrue allegations of
marital infidelity regarding Ehrlich's arch-rival, Baltimore's popular
Democratic Mayor Martin O'Malley; Ehrlich's issuing an edict
permanently forbidding all state employees to speak to a particular Sun
reporter who had been critical of Ehrlich -- if you're not from
Maryland, trust me when I tell you that Ehrlich sleeps under a rock.

In
the case of Schaefer's above-mentioned public humiliation of Ehrlich's
young female assistant, Ehrlich's response to date, rather than to
demand Schaefer's apology or resignation, has been to shrug and tell
everyone to get over it. Local pundits seem to think this is because
Governor Ehrlich covets the favor of the conservative Democrats loyal
to Comptroller Schaefer, whose votes he will need in a tight
re-election race against his challenger, the previously mentioned Mayor
O'Malley. (Are you still with me here? Drink some coffee.) How's that
for a classy boss: hanging his sexually-harassed female assistant out
to dry for the sake of political calculus.

The young woman has, so far, been silent, although there are reports that her father is madder than hell.

I
tell you all of this only as a way of saying that Maryland, my current state of residency, is a political outhouse. So if you are wondering how it is
that a state comptroller can politically survive such vile behavior,
and why a sitting governor would let him, you'll find the answer in the
heavy stench hanging over the Baltimore Harbor on windless days.

But it's a nice place to visit. Truly. The blue crabs here taste great. If you don't think about what they eat.

(Posted 2/18/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)

Cheney Hunting Diary.

- See Dick Stand. See Dick Duck.

Give
shooter Dick "I skipped basic training" Cheney credit for one thing:
even if it was merely for political reasons rather than moral ones, and
even if it came a damning four days late, and even if it was within the
safety of a sympathetic interview with Cheney favorite Brit Hume at the
Administration-flacking Fox News Network instead of in front of an
actual press corps, our arguably most devious Vice President in recent
history did somehow will himself to choke forth the words, "You can't
blame anybody else. I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my
friend."

Those
two sentences, coming from a man like Cheney, were the equivalent of a
hysterically sobbing soliloquy from a person of normal (that is, true)
moral fiber. The fact that he uttered them is a testament to the depth
of his political troubles, or his sense of shame, or both, as a result
of the nature of his shooting of Harry Whittington and his subsequent
behavior.

Those
two lonely sentences were, however, as close as Cheney dared come to
accepting culpability, and they were surrounded by Cheney-esque evasion
and self-justification in the February 15 interview with Hume. I
suspect, actually, that it was the long-demonstrated rarity of any
public candor from this CEO-turned-Vice-President that led some
mainstream media outlets (e.g., the New York Times and the Baltimore
Sun) to yelp in appreciation of his perceived contriteness.

To see if you agree, take a look at these excerpts from the interview, posted in its entirety on the MSNBC website, with
my translations in parentheses:

HUME: Now, you're a seasoned hunter --

CHENEY: I am, well, for the last 12, 15 years.

HUME:
Right, and so you know all the procedures and how to maintain the
proper line and distance between you and other hunters, and all that.
So how, in your judgment, did this happen? Who -- what caused this?
What was the responsibility here?

CHENEY:
Well, ultimately, I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the
round that hit Harry. And you can talk about all of the other
conditions that existed at the time, but that's the bottom line. And
there's no -- it was not Harry's fault. You can't blame anybody else.
I'm the guy who pulled the trigger and shot my friend. And I say that
is something I'll never forget.

(Cheney
owns up to pulling the trigger and to not being able to blame others.
Good, Dick. But notice how he precedes it with, "You can talk about all
the other conditions that existed at the time..." as if to imply, "In
spite of evidence that partially excuses me, I am willing to take
responsibility anyway." Cheney is, I believe, a man who is incapable of
any clean confession of wrongdoing. In other parts of the interview, in
fact, Cheney inserts questions of sunlight, Whittington's appearing by
surprise, and Whittington's being partially obscured by elevation, as
if it is not basic protocol for a hunter to assess a clear and visible
line of fire before pulling the trigger.)

HUME: Was anybody drinking in this party?

CHENEY: No. You don't hunt with people who drink. That's not a good idea. We had --

HUME: So he wasn't, and you weren't?

CHENEY:
Correct. We'd taken a break at lunch -- go down under an old -- ancient
oak tree there on the place, and have a barbecue. I had a beer at
lunch. After lunch we take a break, go back to ranch headquarters.
Then we took about an hour-long tour of the ranch, with a ranch hand
driving the vehicle, looking at game. We didn't go back into the field
to hunt quail until about, oh, sometime after 3:00 p.m. The five of us
who were in that party were together all afternoon. Nobody was
drinking, nobody was under the influence.

(Notice
that in the days following the shooting the story out of the Cheney
camp has migrated from his having had no alcohol to his having had "a
beer." Stay tuned for more possible revisions. Remember, too, that
Cheney stalled 14 hours before being questioned by police. We will
never know the reason. But holding the police at bay until any
breathalyzer risk is past -- in a county where the sheriff is likely
intimidated by the Vice President and his wealthy hosts at the ranch --
is certainly what a man would do after drinking and accidentally
shooting someone. Notice, as well, that Cheney does not specify when
"lunch" was, or how long the party spent afterward at ranch
headquarters before their hour-long tour, making his 3:00 recollection
of their resumed hunt meaningless.)

HUME:
Now, what thought did you give, then, to how -- you must have known
that this was -- whether it was a matter of state, or not, was news.
What thought did you give that evening to how this news should be
transmitted?

CHENEY:
Well, my first reaction, Brit, was not to think: I need to call the
press. My first reaction is: My friend, Harry, has been shot and
we've got to take care of him. That evening there were other
considerations. We wanted to make sure his family was taken care of.
His wife was on the ranch. She wasn't with us when it happened, but we
got her hooked up with the ambulance on the way to the hospital with
Harry. He has grown children; we wanted to make sure they were
notified, so they didn't hear on television that their father had been
shot. And that was important, too.

But
we also didn't know what the outcome here was going to be. We didn't
know for sure what kind of shape Harry was in. We had preliminary
reports, but they wanted to do a CAT scan, for example, to see how --
whether or not there was any internal damage, whether or not any vital
organ had been penetrated by any of the shot. We did not know until
Sunday morning that we could be confident that everything was probably
going to be okay.

(Cheney's reasoning is hogwash. Whittingon's family knew of the shooting long before Cheney's friend Katharine Armstrong
released the story, a line of questioning that Hume then pursues, to his credit.)

HUME: Well, did it occur to you that sooner was -- I mean, the one thing that we've all kind of learned over the last
several decades is that if something like this happens, as a rule sooner is better.

CHENEY: Well, if it's accurate. If it's accurate. And this is a complicated story.

HUME: But there were some things you knew. I mean, you knew the man had been shot, you knew he was injured, you knew
he was in the hospital, and you knew you'd shot him.

CHENEY: Correct.

HUME:
And you knew certainly by sometime that evening that the relevant
members of his family had been called. I realize you didn't know the
outcome, and you could argue that you don't know the outcome today,
really, finally.

CHENEY:
As we saw, if we'd put out a report Saturday night on what we heard
then -- one report came in that said, superficial injuries. If we'd
gone with a statement at that point, we'd have been wrong. And it was
also important, I thought, to get the story out as accurately as
possible, and this is a complicated story that, frankly, most reporters
would never have dealt with before, so --

(This
is, again, complete hogwash. The Cheney camp could have released the
story that night knowing that Whittington's family had been fully
informed. Moreover, it would have been completely appropriate to
include in the statement the fact that Whittington's condition was
still in question. And Cheney's claim that a story of the Vice
President's whirling and accidentally shooting someone is too
"complicated" for prompt release is absurdly self-serving.)

CHENEY:
...Katharine suggested, and I agreed, that she would go make the
announcement, that is that she'd put the story out. And I thought that
made good sense for several reasons. First of all, she was an
eye-witness. She'd seen the whole thing. Secondly, she'd grown up on
the ranch, she'd hunted there all of her life. Third, she was the
immediate past head of the Texas Wildlife and Parks Department, the
game control commission in the state of Texas, an acknowledged expert
in all of this.

And
she wanted to go to the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, which is the local
newspaper, covers that area, to reporters she knew. And I thought that
made good sense because you can get as accurate a story as possible
from somebody who knew and understood hunting. And then it would
immediately go up to the wires and be posted on the Web site, which is
the way it went out. And I thought that was the right call.

(This
is nonsense. Accounts have established that Armstrong, although nearby,
did not witness the actual physical shooting of Whittington. Her
growing up on the ranch and her being a former state wildlife
bureaucrat are laughably irrelevant to the fact that the Vice President
had shot someone. Nor does her being a hunter have any bearing; if
anything, this argument strengthens the case that Cheney himself should
have made the public statement.)

HUME:
...Now, the suspicion grows in some quarters that you -- that this was
an attempt to minimize it, by having it first appear in a little paper
and appear like a little hunting incident down in a remote corner of
Texas.

CHENEY:
There wasn't any way this was going to be minimized, Brit; but it was
important that it be accurate. I do think what I've experienced over
the years here in Washington is as the media outlets have proliferated,
speed has become sort of a driving force, lots of time at the expense
of accuracy. And I wanted to make sure we got it as accurate as
possible, and I think Katharine was an excellent choice.

(After more questioning by Hume, Cheney elaborates:)

...I
had a bit of the feeling that the press corps was upset because, to
some extent, it was about them -- they didn't like the idea that we
called the Corpus Christi Caller-Times instead of The New York Times.
But it strikes me that the Corpus Christi Caller-Times is just as valid
a news outlet as The New York Times is, especially for covering a major
story in south Texas.

(What nonsense. The town's tiny local newspaper, virtually unstaffed at the
time Armstrong called and completely unprepared for such a huge
national story, is a better assurance of "accurate" coverage than a
fleet of veteran reporters with huge resources at their disposal?
Cheney's motives for circumventing both the White House press machinery
and the national media are painfully transparent: he hoped that the
story would go away if Whittington was not substantially injured, or
that he could at least stall for more time until the national media
pounced on it. Further, a prompt national release would have created
pressure on the local sheriff's office to question Cheney sooner.
Whether his drinking was a factor or not, Cheney wanted to duck
attention as long as he possibly could.)

And so this is mea culpa, Dick Cheney style.

The only thing we can say for certain, as with most of the Vice President's affairs, is that we don't know the whole story.

(Posted 2/17/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)

- The Cheney Casualties Keep Coming.

It just keeps getting worse.

Now
78-year-old Harry Whittington, accidental shooting victim of
bird-busting Vice President Dick "no military draft or quail stamp for
me" Cheney, is in intensive care after a migrating birdshot pellet
caused what his doctors called a mild heart attack. He will remain
hospitalized for up to a week, they say.

Meanwhile, Cheney, as if his past six years of public cretinism were not sufficiently damning of his character, is doing
everything possible to appear soulless, cowardly, and deceptive.

He
literally sneaked out the back door at a press conference to avoid
facing journalists. He has failed to step forward and account for
himself in any way regarding the shooting, whether via a statement of
anguish or a declaration of responsibility or any other show of
humanity or statesmanship. He concealed the incident from public view,
waiting 14 hours before being interviewed by police, and later hid
behind a friend who made a public announcement of the shooting.

Mind
you, it's not as if the police didn't try to talk to the Vice
President. A deputy who showed up earlier to question him at the ranch
where the shooting happened was turned away -- that's right, turned
away -- by guards at the gate, according to the Washington Post. It
seems King Dick was not yet ready to allow the inquiries of law
enforcement. Imagine how many seconds it would take for you or me to be
handcuffed after shooting someone and telling police, "I'm not ready to
talk. Come back later."

Some,
such as Lawrence O'Donnell at the Huffington Post, are beginning to
wonder aloud if Cheney may have been drunk at the time of the shooting,
which he denies. We will never know, because he stalled long enough to
render a breathalyzer test useless. You have to admit: when a man
shoots someone and then avoids the police for 14 hours despite their
attempts to talk to him, the logical question is, "Why, if he has
nothing to hide?"

And
now, in a tilt toward the absurd, it turns out that gun-toting,
draft-dodging Dick was also hunting illegally on that day, due to his
failure to acquire a routine seven-dollar upland game bird stamp as
required by law. Cheney has since reportedly been issued a citation and
has belatedly paid his fee.

So
here is what we've got: a guy who brazenly evaded military service
himself, who has lied and dissembled to wage a disastrous war that has
killed tens of thousands for the sake of corporate interests, who has
defended torture, who has placed himself and his political abuses above
the law at every turn, and who has now shot someone and stalled the
police and hidden mutely behind guards and spokespersons while the
victim's condition has worsened.

And this man is Vice President of a sovereign nation.

Remind me again: what country do we live in?

(Posted 2/15/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)

- Dick Strikes Again.

First,
let's say we are glad that Cheney's fellow quail hunter, millionaire
Texas attorney Harry Whittington, survived Cheney's accidental blast
and, at this writing, is in stable condition at a Corpus Christi
hospital with shotgun pellets in his face, neck and chest.

And
we are just as glad to hear that Dick "fuck yourself" Cheney felt moved
to the point of being "very apologetic" about having shot his friend in
the face while aiming at birds, according to the Associated Press.

But
face it: One would be hard pressed to find a more cruelly fitting
metaphor for the brutal havoc and human suffering wreaked by this
reckless pug of a vice president, who has wielded his office like a
howitzer to force the invasion of a non-threatening nation, destroy
political enemies, and line the pockets of his colleagues and friends.

There is, however, in light of his shotgun-spraying incident, one thing to be said on behalf of chickenhawk Cheney, who
as a young man connived to use five successive deferments to avoid serving in Vietnam:

This time, at least, Cheney held the gun in his own hands.

(Posted 2/13/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)

Drinking the Black Kool-Aid.

Man, I get tired of having to explain that black Americans are not a cult.

Here
is a headline from the front page of the January 28, 2006 Washington
Post (it's the same day's Post that contained the topic of my previous
blog; I'm getting a lot of mileage out of that day's news coverage.
Anyway, here is the headline):

"GAY UNIONS FRACTURE MARYLAND'S BLACK CAUCUS"

The
story, by Post reporter Matthew Mosk, details how, following a ruling
by a Baltimore circuit court that Maryland's ban on same-sex marriage
is unconstitutional, an ugly conflict has arisen between black Maryland
politicians (and constituencies) who oppose the rights of gay Americans
and those who support them. As reporter Mosk puts it:

"Maryland's
African American lawmakers are deeply divided in the emerging debate
over same-sex marriage, which forces them to balance their communities'
bedrock religious convictions against a traditional commitment to civil
rights."

Mosk
is right in the sense that black voters and leaders are fighting about
this. The anti-gay-marriage factions, led chiefly by prominent black
pastors who claim authority from chosen passages in the Bible -- and
some of whom see in the gay issue an opportunity for demagogic
self-promotion as moral warriors -- condemn same-sex marriage as a
fouling of the church's tradition as a bastion of black moral strength.
Anti-gay feelings are also fed by a palpable fear among some blacks
that gayness constitutes yet another attack on black manhood, already
under siege in a society that criminalizes and disempowers black males.
On the other side, blacks who support gay rights claim the moral high
ground in supporting civil rights for all, and denounce the hypocrisy
of blacks who would fight for their own rights while turning their
backs on the struggle of another oppressed minority.

But
where Mosk is wrong, and where many reporters who cover such black
political conflicts make their mistake, is in relying on fictional,
meaninglessly broad phrases such as "their communities' bedrock
religious convictions" in describing black sensibilities. As a black
American, I guess I qualify as a member of one of Mosk's alleged black
"communities," and yet neither Christianity nor its claimed preclusion
of gay rights figure in my "bedrock convictions," nor in those of a
number of black people I know. I am an African American who happens to
have a very nice spiritual relationship with the divine, thank you very
much, and my "community" is not represented by demagogues who rail
against the scourge of gay marital rights. Nor is there anything
remarkable about the fact that my position on this differs from that
of, say, one of my cousins or a black colleague. We're human. We
differ.

And
that's the rub with this "the black community is divided" bugaboo. I've
heard it more times, on more issues, than I want to remember, and it
always puts me in mind of other ethnic voter-division stories I'd love
to see on the front pages of the Post and other newspapers but never
do. Say, for instance:

WHITE VOTERS SPLIT ON PUBLIC TRANSIT ISSUE
"White
voters in edge-city subdivisions are deeply divided over transportation
issues, which force them to choose between their bedrock need to
decrease traffic congestion and their long-held community traditions of
self-reliant transportation..."

or:

ABORTION DIVIDES WHITE COMMUNITIES
"In
many white American communities, the abortion issue has opened up an
ugly rift between two bedrock values: a long-established cultural
reverence for the miracle of childbearing and an equally long-held
belief in individual liberty..."

I
am still looking to see stories like these in major newspapers. They
will never appear in print, however, and you know why: To treat it as
big news that American whites differ widely on public transit or on
abortion would be absurd. It would be nonsensical because we all
understand that whites are a varied group of human beings with diverse
experiences and opinions. We respect the variety of white experience
too much to make the ridiculous mistake of expecting a sameness of
opinion.

So why is it front-page news that black "communities" and their political representatives differ on same-sex
marriage?

I'll
admit that this is not an entirely fair question. Differences among
blacks on the civil rights of gays do seem more interesting than
differences among whites on the same topic because the issue of civil
rights itself has been so central to the progress of blacks in America.
It's a man-bites-dog story: members of a group who successfully fought
to be treated equally are now fiercely denying equal treatment to
another group. I can understand why reporters and pundits are drawn to
the irony, and why self-righteous passions run so high among blacks on
all sides of the issue. For a people whose very survival has hinged on
the question of civil rights, "bigotry" is a high-stakes word.

Moreover,
the increasing upward mobility of African Americans into the
white-dominated mainstream is creating more and more diversity of
opinion among blacks where once there was something closer to
unanimity. Time was, during an era of legalized lynching and
segregation, that voting for a platform of aggressive federal
government protections and services for the disenfranchised was, for
nearly all blacks, an article of faith as a matter of both principle
and personal survival, especially on southern back roads after dark.
Not so, however, in the 21st century for many educated suburban blacks
who drive SUVs, fear the urban poor, and resent what they view as the
wasting of their tax dollars to coddle the black underclass. Bill
Cosby, take your cue.

So
I am not claiming that the "blacks on gay rights" flap is not a story.
In fact, I would have no problem at all with the Post story if it
weren't the eleventy-millionth press account I've seen over the years
trumpeting the "news" that blacks embrace clashing opinions on some
burning issue or other. I am sick and tired of the tendency to label
diversities of opinion as aberrations or fratricidal wars when they
happen within black populations.

You'll
recall the shocking 1980s "news" that some blacks voted for Ronald
Reagan (my father, an entrepreneurial store owner, was one of them, and
man, did we argue). And the startling revelation that many of today's
middle-aged educated and prosperous blacks, having been born into
middle-class life in the 1960s and 70s, feel little connection or
loyalty to drug-ridden black inner-city neighborhoods -- except when
they want good barbecue or a beautician who knows their hair. Now we
also have the ostensibly astounding spectacle of a black Secretary of
State, groomed by a right-wing political machine, who happily shills
for the agenda of that machine. Not to mention the all-too-common
"black voters are conflicted" silliness seen in front-page stories
about black candidates vying against each other in mostly-black
districts.

Once,
when I appeared on a radio talk show in the Midwest discussing race,
the white host asked me, with some incredulity, how it is that when
blacks assimilate into the mainstream they sometimes abandon liberal
politics. "Blacks move to the suburbs," he exclaimed, "and they get
conservative! I don't get it. What's going on?" I told him, with as
much restraint as I could muster, that becoming more conservative and
self-centered is what middle-class suburbanites tend to do, period,
regardless of color. It goes with the turf. He took this as a
remarkable insight about black political versatility.

So, with probably more optimism than I am entitled to, I'll now put forward the following attempt at a rebuttal to the
stupidly pervasive idea of a lockstep black multitude:

We
black folks do not all drink the Kool-Aid. We do not even necessarily
drink from similar containers. We consume all manner of political and
moral concoctions from all manner of sources, and some of us refuse all
proffered flavors in favor of our own creations, and others simply do
not imbibe at all. We do not line up at the barrel to drink the Black
Juice, and it is not news that this is true.

But we can talk about this next year, when there will likely be a need to discuss it again.

(Posted 2/1/06 by Bruce A. Jacobs)

The Bullshit Life.

An unlikely little bestseller is now making the rounds.

It
is a tiny volume entitled "On Bullshit" (Princeton, 2005), written by
Princeton emeritus professor Harry G. Frankfurt. I have not read it,
but I have leafed through a friend's copy -- it's just about the cutest
little damned volume you'll ever see -- and I have heard plenty of the
talk about its surprising rise to pop notoriety. The story goes that it
was a scholarly paper of Frankfurt's that attracted such a cult
following over the years that he finally adapted it into a small book.
The rest is media history, to the point where last summer even The New
Yorker ran a piece [August 22, 2005], a sort of history-of-bullshit
muse, based on Frankfurt's book.

There
are serious questions to be knocked around here, such as whether
bullshit is defined by the intent to bullshit (is a truth
unintentionally told by an attempted bullshitter still bullshit?) or by
the intrinsic meaninglessness of the bullshit itself. And there is an
ongoing debate -- mostly among people who have plenty of real food and
possessions -- about whether or not the very idea of reality is
bullshit.

But what most people in the discussion seem to agree on is that bullshit is most dangerous when the bullshitter has utterly
lost his or her regard for the truth.

Sound like any sitting American president you've heard blustering lately?

I
don't mean to put all of this on the Bullshitter-In-Chief. He is merely
the ripe tip of a very deep pimple. What this entire bullshit
conversation is really about, it seems to me, is that we Americans have
found ourselves at a point where the great mass of our public life is
now, well, bullshit: a pus-white expanse of thick, poisonously
meaningless goop. And we know it. And we don't like it. I mean, do you
enjoy knowing that virtually every shouted claim banging against your eardrums --
new improved taste, more attentive doctors, superior pain relief,
greater security against terrorists -- is an utter waste of your
attention? Does it give you pleasure to understand that you are bathed
in untruth at nearly every turn of the news and commercial dial? Do you
like the feeling of expending so much of your cognitive energy on
pointlessness? I'll wager that most Americans do not, and I'll also
wager that the makers of Prozac and Paxil are taking a good chunk of
the resulting malaise to the bank.

To
be sure, paying attention in America is no fun. But that's just the
beginning of our problem. It's not just that it feels so lousy to move
through days and years in which nothing is worth believing. It's also
that this kind of life -- our culture of bullshit -- does real damage
to us as human organisms.

Bear with me on this. Here's what I'm talking about.

For
starters, a lifelong diet of bullshit breeds selfishness and a contempt
for the human project. American suburbia, for instance, with its
interchangeable edge-city wedges of anonymity and its blur of constant
forgettability, is basically an engineered domicile for bullshit: a
honeycomb of green compartments within which a smug derision toward
collective meaning can be safely and privately entertained. Active
neighborhoods? Forget it. Shared social enterprises? No, thanks. In any
way of life where the shared experience of the many is trusted and
honored, suburbia as we know it could never exist.

But
the damage done by the bullshit life goes even deeper. Living on
bullshit numbs the part of us that chooses to feel the world, the part
of us that remains open in its desire to embrace and believe. That
neglected part of us, our quality of openness, is like an arm that we
no longer use. Like Lenin used to predict about the state, it withers
away. Go out and stump door-to-door for a cause? That's for crazies and
suckers. March on your town hall or your nation's capitol? Sure, if
you're one of those physically unattractive true-believer misfits who
has no life. Meet with other citizens to talk about how the political
system could be better? Yeah, if you can't get a date and you can't
afford cable. We have succeeded, it seems, in stripping public life of
its publicness. Today, in the era of My Computer, our public space has
become a mall that we walk through on our way from one private consumer
experience to the next -- while talking on our cell phones. It's all
about me, multiplied by about 300 million.

Which
brings us back to the Head Me ensconced in the White House. What I find
myself wondering, after Iraq and the secret torture gulags and the NSA
spying program, is if George W. Bush is in fact a true bullshitter or
if he is a mere liar.

A
true bullshitter, under Frankurt's definition, is someone whose intent
is neither to evade the truth nor to embrace it, but instead to simply
pursue or promote a line of thinking for its own sake on the premise
that there is, in fact, no truth to be found in the world. To the
bullshitter, the dynamic of truth and lies never comes to mind. It is
simply a matter of getting what one wants. In that sense, a pure
bullshitter -- or, alternately, a raving crazy, which Bush could
conceivably be -- occupies a self-intoxicating reality without the
burden of conscious deceit. A bullshitter's world is one in which the
very idea of truth versus lying seems distant and irrelevant.

But
a liar is a different animal entirely. A liar knows truth, and makes it
his or her conscious, devious business to conceal it or to circumvent
it. A liar operates in the same arena as a truth-teller, but from the
opposite side of the field. He or she is out to beat the living hell
out of truth in order for lies to prevail, often by any deceitful or
abusive means available.

My guess, made without the benefit of private audience or access to psychoanalytic records, is that Bush is a bullshitter
and Dick Cheney is a liar.

Bush
is the classic demagogue: a middling, muddled kind of guy who, by luck
of lineage in his case, has gotten his little-bully hands on the
world's most powerful machine and is thrilled to euphoria with the
resulting joy ride. He looks, talks and acts like a boy caught up in a
perpetual personal fantasy, like an only child in his bedroom acting
out a drama with plastic army men who has, for the time being at least,
lost sight of the line between play and reality. He is possessed by the
game. True, one can make a case, as I've said, that Bush's ramblings
are more battiness than bullshit. But I'll stick with my contention
that he's a bullshitter. Bush is no nut. He is simply consumed by the
needs of his own story.

Cheney,
on the other hand, comes across as a good old-fashioned, ice-blooded
liar. He assesses. He calculates. He conceals. He asserts, then denies,
with no change of facial expression. He stands before the microphones
and brazenly contradicts his own past statements with that steely "I
dare you to go dig up the tape" glare at reporters. He coolly defies
subpoenas from committees and confidently tells a senator in the full
chamber to fuck himself. He cocks his head while speaking so that the
whirring of the gears is practically audible as he thinks three lies
ahead of each sentence. He is as natural a liar as has ever taken the
public stage.

But,
bullshit or lies, what it all comes down to is that to a lot of
Americans everything now means less. The world is fake. Nothing
matters. Which means that a good portion of what the human animal was
built to do -- to pay attention, to reason, to feel, to understand --
is inclined to shut down, since seeking meaning and truth has seemingly
proven to be a frigging waste of time. I'd call that serious damage.

There
is a scene in Woody Allen's film "Take the Money and Run" in which the
Allen character, as a child, reads in a science book about the
existence of entropy and promptly gives up on life. He stops doing his
homework, won't obey his parents, and ceases to care about anything
because, no matter what he does, the universe is inevitably grinding
down toward nothingness. When a child psychologist tries to urge him to
participate in life despite the fleeting nature of the universe, the
young Allen shrugs indifferently and asks, "What's the point?"